The outrage lasted the whole weekend. Eventually, the government arrested 9 men. Several have criminal records, so the government defined the crime as gang violence and vowed to clamp down on gang crimes. The video spread fast and wide on Chinese social media. But people who tried to point out that this is violence against women were quickly blamed as “making trouble between genders” and quickly censored.
Meanwhile, video from another angle was also made public.
People listened to the audio carefully and claimed that they heard the following: the guy stepped into the restaurant, saying: “Let’s drag that girl to the ally to rape her.” He then went to the girl and touched her back. The girl asked: “What are you doing”. The guy answered, “I want to fuck you.” And her friends said, “We don’t know you.” The guy started attacking the girl and the girl fought back with a bottle…
Many people and alt media noticed that in the video, almost no man came forward to stop the fight, but almost every women tried. Two women were hospitalized, two others suffered minor injuries. In the video footage, you can even see the girl that was mostly savagely beaten, got up at some point, to save her friend who was dragged into a dark place. These observations dominated social media discussion: why Chinese men have no balls?
And of course, the BBQ shop is also being targeted: some men went to the BBQ shop to pee in front of the door.
The owner said that she was bullied on the internet and she received non-stop harassing phone calls.. And no one paid that night.
Many speculated that the real reason the shop was targeted is because they released the security footage.
You can read the BBC report China: Footage of women attacked in restaurant sparks outrage, with background information provided by Kerry Allen, a Chinese Media Analyst:
“Acts of violence against women are frighteningly common in China. “
The day the video appeared on social media, women were calling each other to pay attention to the incident. In this video, a high school student used microphone from her school to call on everyone to go to internet to search the key words: “Tangshan”, “attack”.
The brutality of the attack and the anger of women are the main reason of the lasting outrage. Many women documented their fights with their parents on social media because the parents, as usual, blamed the girls for eating out late at night. If you remember the chained women who was forced to have 8 children with the man who bought her, and how it sparked outrage, you can see, once again,that women are collectively experiencing another round of trauma, and some of them could not even get support from their own parents.
One Australian-Chinese woman reporter described her own experience of being bullied in public with no one ever helped her. She said: “that is why I would rush to help justice.” Her name is Vicky Xu and she is known for exposing human rights abuses in China. In March 2020, Xu was the lead author of a report, Uyghurs for Sale, stating many Uyghurs from Xinjiang had been moved to China proper for forced labour. This led to a campaign of harassment against Xu, including death threats and smear videos. She is one of many brave Chinese women who are willing to help others fighting back injustice.
Chinese men and media like to label Chinese feminism as extreme feminism. But many women asked: how comes extreme feminism in China is just “please don’t kill me”.
One of the worst reaction is from men, who on social media threatened to rape a daughter of the bad guys.
Then our old friend, retired chief editor of CCP mouthpiece Global Times, Hu Xijin went on to express how he think that men should always protect women: he recalled an old soviet movie he watched when he was 20 years old. In the movie, Soviet army was fighting the Germans. One first aid was a woman who was left behind and almost got into the German hands. The Soviet army fought back to rescue her and suffered heavy loss. Yes, protect their own woman at all cost. But then Hu said that the woman’s husband was there too, he was so angry that so many men died because of his wife, he went to slap her on the face! Hu said he was moved to tears.
Tell me you are a piece of shit without saying it.
Liu Lipeng used to work to censor internet in China, he felt traumatized by the video. He said he was very broken by the video and wanted to cry. When he worked for censorship in China, he had seen so many videos like this one. Often when the viewership reached 2000, they will be ordered to censor it because it is “negative energy”. He quit his job because he did not want to see things any more. The trauma of this video forced him to stay offline for a day. He also said that he observed heavy censorship on the topic and the official narrative actively making it a mafia crime, not a gender issue.
Some people found past cases that showed that if men helped women fighting back, they are often being punished by Chinese legal system. One screenshot of a government social media account described that out of 100 cases when defendant argued for self-defence, 76 were ruled as crime of intentional harming others, 20 were ruled as defending improperly, and only 4 cases were accepted as self defence. The only proper self defence is to run, the government said.
Someone offered an explanation on the legal design: “Long ago, when I was a student, a law scholar made a comment. I forgot the original words, but it is roughly like this: our legal system intentionally penalize the courageous people, especially those who dare to speak up for other people, and even fight for others. It wants to force people to only care about their short term self-interest. The logic is just like people said, to atomize every one (so people could not unite together). This is good for “stability”, good for domination. Does it sound familiar to you? This is in the theory of Shang Yang, punishing the strong people. “
Shang Yang was a Chinese jurist who lived 2000 years ago in the Warring state period. His idea of governance was adopted by the Kingdom of Qin and ensued Qin’s unification of China. He was one of the founders of the Chinese Legalism_, which laid the foundation of the bureaucratic Chinese empire.
Most men think that not interfering is the only correct option. And official media backed them up. This happened because many women (and men) were outraged at the indifference of bystanders, which is all of the men at the scene. Many men felt hurt and angry and attacked by the criticism. They claimed that those women, those so called feminists, are deliberately making trouble between the genders. It is stupid to interfere, they say, because the laws make it illegal. ” We are not wrong, but being thoughtful and pragmatical”.
Some men are pushing back on this. One famous Chinese activist writer, Mo Zhixu commented: “Maybe you wanted to do something (if not, there is really no hope), but you did/dared not, then you got to ask, what have taken away your heart of being a human? You could find many reasons, but none of them should exempt you of your shame. Only the feeling of shame, make it possible for us to be a human being. The society in a totalitarian system must be like a pile of sand, everyone was forced to only care for themselves, but you must know this is not normal, and you should not agree with it. Many people are angry at bystanders being blamed, but that is just to build an armour to protect one self from one’s own sense of shame. “
Lu Yuyu (Anthony), the former citizen journalist from our COVID stories, is firmly and loudly calling out men to be honest with themselves. You can be a timid person not dare to fight, but you have to admit that is because you are scared and you should be ashamed. He said: “Such incidents are many. No matter what women say about men, I would not speak one word in defence of men .”
When Tangshan caught the attention of the whole country, other people from Tangshan spoke up on their cases, when Mafias beat them up and the police chose to ignore them.
Their cases got attention from high up and were resolved quickly. One of the victims spoke up to thank the government and condemn the netizens for making Tangshan look bad.
Tangshan police launched “Action Leitingfengbao” (meaning, Action Lightening Storm). At night, security guards marched into night market to provide security, and stared at people eating. One official loudly instructed people not to make trouble and not to talk to strangers. You wonder why they behave so hilariously. Well, the performance is not for you, but for the Boss.
James Palmer is a deputy editor of Foreign Policy, he used to live in China and worked for Hu Xijin in Global Times, so he knows China quite well.
On June 11th, he provided some context here:
a note on the horrifying Tangshan video. When I was in the city for research (c. 2008-2011 or so), the presence of organized crime was pretty notable. That’s not uncommon in provincial cities. Violence against women is certainly not limited to gangsters but - the sense of impunity in public to me suggests either gangsters or rich/connected kids, and there aren’t really rich kids in Tangshan. They go to Tianjin or Beijing. I’m very glad that there were immediate arrests made in this case. If you read studies like Zheng Tiantian’s RED LIGHTS, you’ll see she records routine assaults, both violent and sexual, on women by gangsters, with effective impunity from police. Action was also possible in this case because there was no relationship between the attackers and the victim, and because of the extremity. in most cases police treat domestic violence very differently, even caught on video. anyway time to re-up Tan Weiwei’s amazing, brutal song, “Jane Doe”, with English subtitle.
The next day, Mr. Palmer commented on the government reaction: > it’s much easier for the authorities to fit this into a ‘anti-crime’ framework than a gendered framework - and in fact we’ve seen some banning of accounts that tried to provide the second > as I’ve noted, both are true in this case - and organized crime in China habitually gets away with violence against women in particular. > there are always heavy connections between crime and officialdom and as we saw in Chongqing under Bo, even when a campaign ‘sweeps up’ the gangs and corrupt officials, it often just replaces it with systems run by the newcomers
Violence against women is not unique in China, but I am afraid that Chinese women are facing a much bigger adversary than elsewhere.
Beijing government mistook a person to be quarantined at home, according to social media post. A woman in Beijing found herself mistaken as a man who was tested positive recently. Despite her repeated efforts to make the authority realize that the name, the gender and age were all wrong, she was forced to stay at home for 3 days, while the man, who was positive, was roaming the city.
In another city in the north, residents of a whole unit were taken away for quarantine because one of them was positive. When they came back, they asked each other who was the positive person, and they found out he lives in another unit, and was already cured.
A “volunteer” that worked as Big White in Shanghai committed suicide, and left a suicide note: he was tested positive on his first day as Big White and had to be quarantined and charged a fee for the quarantine. After he was cured, he could not find a job because he was once positive. He tried to reason with the agent who got him the job of Big White, but the agent beat him up in front of the police. He decided to die after the humiliation.
Shanghai government is asking Shanghai citizens, especially party members for donation. According to social media, the government is calling everyone on the phone, asking each to donate 100 yuan. People say, “you locked me for three months, never cared about how I pay my car loans, my mortgage, my daily expenditure, never cared about me losing work, now you are calling to ask me for money…. I can not imagine.”